If you want your texts to be professional and clear, you need to pay attention to three key points. These points are essential for improving the quality and readability of your work.

1. Check All Your Commas Punctuation can often be overlooked when it comes to writing, but correct punctuation is vital if you want your work to be taken seriously. The humble comma can be confusing for even the best writers. This punctuation mark has several uses and rules but the most helpful rule concerning its use is to not use a comma if it is better to have two sentences divided by a full stop. This will give your writing much more clout and make the reader sit up and take notice. Be daring. End that sentence. Don’t use commas unnecessarily.If you follow this rule, your writing will be much easier to read and you will avoid run-on sentences.

2. Make Your Sentence Construction Simpler Simplifying your sentences makes them stronger. Understanding what makes a good sentence construction requires some grammar knowledge. As we all know, sentences contain nouns and verbs, as well as adjectives and adverbs. Let’s look at an example of a sentence using nouns and verbs:“The girl walked to the shops.”There are three parts to this sentence. The most important is the action word, the verb, “walked”. The other two parts of the sentence are nouns, “girl” and “shops”. The “girl” is the subject, the thing carrying out the action, and “shops” is the object, the thing being acted upon. Therefore, the structure of this sentence is noun, verb, and noun.A simple way to work out if a sentence is active and strong is to see whether or not it clearly answers the following questions in terms of its construction:

What is being done/carried out?

Who/what is doing it?

Who/what is it being done to?

Sometimes, you will find that using extra words other than the three parts demonstrated above will weaken the impact and effect of the sentence.

3. Activate All Your Verbs Another way to improve the quality of your writing is to use the imperative form of a verb (to be, to walk, to sleep, etc) rather than the gerund form, which involves using the suffix “-ing” (being, walking, sleeping, and so on).

The reason for this is that the “ing” form of the verb can be an indication of an awkward or weak sentence. A verb’s imperative form is its un-conjugated form. If we use the verb “to walk” (imperative form) as an example, we can see that it can be conjugated into “walks”, “walked” and “will walk”, depending on the tense. Using the gerund form of the verb makes less of a statement in your writing. Let us see another example:“The man went to the doctor asking for medicine.”“The man went to the doctor to ask for medicine.”While there is nothing incorrect about the first sentence, it is weakened by the use of the gerund form of “to ask”. That is why the second sentence is much stronger in structure – simply by using the imperative form of the verb.These three simple rules will go a long way to helping you improve the quality of your writing. Remember to also check for spelling errors and word repetitions.

Kay Hutchings-Olsson offers writing, editing and proofreading services to students, academics and professionals who use English as a second language.

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